Siberian Exile: Blood, War, and a Granddaughter's Reckoning - Softcover

Sukys, Julija

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496216679 ISBN 13: 9781496216670

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Synopsis

2018 Book Prize from the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies
2018 Vine Award for Canadian Jewish Literature in Nonfiction from the Koffler Centre of the Arts in Toronto
 
When Julija Šukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught Šukys her family’s story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941 three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years working on a collective farm. It was all a mistake, the family maintained.

Some seventy years after these events, Šukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion. Piecing the story together from letters, oral histories, audio recordings, and KGB documents, her research soon revealed a Holocaust-era secret—a family connection to the killing of seven hundred Jews in a small Lithuanian border town. According to KGB documents, the man in charge when those massacres took place was Anthony, Ona’s husband.

In Siberian Exile Šukys weaves together the two narratives: the story of Ona, noble exile and innocent victim, and that of Anthony, accused war criminal. She examines the stories that communities tell themselves and considers what happens when the stories we’ve been told all our lives suddenly and irrevocably change, and how forgiveness operates across generations and the barriers of life and death.
 

About this title

About the Author

Julija Šukys is an associate professor of creative nonfiction at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She is the author of Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimaitė (Nebraska, 2012) and Silence Is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout (Nebraska, 2007).
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496216679
• ISBN 13: 9781496216670
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 198